SpaceX signs first contract for reused rocket

Hah, this will cause little impact to SpaceX. They have had a launch failure before and came back stronger than ever. "Rocket technology" is immensely complicated and there are anomalies that can only be prevented by experience.

 

Brief research showed SpaceX backed by government subsidiaries and projects. I'm on mobile if you want links I'll post them later but a quick Google search should provide with you enough resources.

 

Yes. Those are contracts for services. They aren't investments. Of course this might make them get less customers but they had a failure last year and they still had plenty of people coming to them for services.

 

Well you know I completely respect what they're doing, space is after all the final frontier. I'm more interested in the recent signal found in deep space over what could have once been on Mars however.

My overall belief is that we need to get our shit together here on Earth before we worry about galactic expansion. If the dominating world powers with space programs can't get along, they'll be fighting for territory on these new "inhabitable environments." I imagine there will be conflict and I imagine that the conflict would stir more dust here at Home.

 

I got excited when i heard that on news !

 

I didn't read the article, but are they using a portion of the rocket that has left the atmosphere? If so, aren't they worried about contamination?

 

They are reusing the first stage. I'm not sure if there is really a clean line between atmosphere and not (the ISS still technically runs into some stray atmosphere). My google foo is telling me the first stage goes from 100km to 180km up.

 

That's true man, it's pretty amazing no doubt.

 

was this the rocket that just blew up and was in the news? or was that a different satellite.

 

It was what was just on the news. It blew up while they were filling it for an engine test fire or something.

 

all that money for funding it, what a setback.

 

The launch was insured and they have plenty of money. The setback is really just that it will take a lot of time to figure out the cause of the failure, fix the pad, and fix whatever caused the failure in the first place. Money isn't really much of a problem.

 

This is really cool

 

You can't reuse parts for such a delicate procedure. This is just one example of why not

 

Sure you can, Space Shuttle?

 

Let me rephrase what I stated, you can't reuse rocket parts.

 

what space shuttle are you talking about btw? Please do tell

 

Discovery is a great example of a rocket being reused, flew 39 missions. Even the Challenger and Endeavor are good examples of showing disasters can happen but that doesn't mean it is impossible.

 

They don't even know what caused this issue yet so we can't draw any conclusions. No one had any idea how well rockets hold up in an orbital trajectory until very recently and they can only learn so much from looking at them. They need to try to relaunch it to see what happens and collect a bunch of data.

 

So you're using the discovery "space shuttle rocket" which exploded during take off as an example?